When I was eighteen, I was in my last year of high school, and living in a little town we’ll call “Listless” (population 5,000) in southwestern Ontario. My then best friend “Shelby” and I made the acquaintance of a guy named “Clinton Smith”. Shelby always had a way of scraping shallow acquaintances with people and hanging out with them for a little while before they drifted off. She always liked to have lots of people around her because she was very extroverted and terribly insecure, and it made her feel popular.

Clinton was one such acquaintance. He was an R.N.A., was 20 years old, and had just moved to Listless to take a job in a nursing home. I didn’t think him all that intelligent, interesting, or attractive in any way, though he seemed harmless enough. I spent perhaps three evenings around Clinton, one in Listless’s one pub, the other two at his apartment. One evening a bunch of us played cards, another evening there were more people there and it was almost a party.

The evening we spent playing cards Clinton kept saying that he wanted to see some particular movie that was playing at our little town cinema, but he “really, really, really didn’t want to go alone. No, he didn’t want to go alone at all.” Shelby and I later agreed that as the only two girls present this was a hint directed at one of us, but we couldn’t figure out which one. But neither of us were interested – we both had boyfriends, as Clinton had been clearly told – and so we forbore to take the hint or even to make eye contact.

During the party at Clinton’s place Clinton got quite drunk and kept saying to me, “Shwannie, that boyfriend of yoursh ish one lucky guy.” I would give him a polite, closed-lip smile and then start talking to someone else.

A few days later, at school, my boyfriend Colin came up to me and asked me if I knew Clinton Smith. I said I did, and then Colin told me it had gotten back to him that Clinton was asking people around town if they knew Colin, and mentioning me in the conversation. After that, I told Shelby I didn’t want anything more to do with Clinton.

Then a few weeks later Shelby told me Clinton had seen her out somewhere and approached her to ask for a character reference. It seems Clinton had been charged with sexual assault, was claiming he was totally innocent, and was going about asking people to vouch for his character. Shelby gave him one. I asked Shelby WHY she would give him a reference when she knew him so slightly and there was this negative and/or weird incident of him asking around about my boyfriend that had yet to be accounted for. Well, she wanted to help him out. Oh. We later heard the case came to nothing and was dropped.

Flash forward about nine years. I had a job at a legal publishing company, and one day in a moment of boredom I idly searched the case database for “Listless” - and one of the things that came up was a case involving Clinton Smith. I forget what he was charged with, but one of the things that came up in the case was that he had been posing as an R.N., though he was in fact only an R.N.A. He'd made up a fake diploma to hang on his apartment wall. But he wasn't being charged for this because apparently he had never tried to use the fake credentials professionally - they were solely for the purposes of advancing his social prestige.

This was only one of the adventures I had because Shelby chose to go for quantity over quality when selecting her friends.

And now that I think of it, perhaps I ought to do a little research on good old Clinton and find out how his career has unfolded....

I find that fallout of the nuclear variety influences people in a bad way.

ANTICLIMAX!! GRR.

So what happened to Colin?

He turned out to be gay. But that's another story for another time.

I guess you all didn't like this one. Sigh. Well, I thought the fake nurses's credentials were pretty funny in a George "I always wanted to pretend to be an architect" Costanza kind of way.